Zotac GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2GB amp! Edition Review

The classic orange and black styling of Zotac cards is again present in its version of the GTX 650 Ti. The orange 90mm fan sits atop the aluminium heatsink, and the design of the cooler means that most of the resultant hot air will be exhausted into your case, probably more so than with the EVGA card as no attempt is made here to channel air through the rear I/O panel.

The heatsink does leave a bit more room between itself and the memory chips than the EVGA card, but it also extends towards the rear panel and provides some coverage for the power circuitry too, which the EVGA GTX 650 Ti 1GB does not.

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Although the Zotac card uses a PCB the same length as the EVGA, the end of the cooler protrudes slightly and means that the card is 154mm lengthways, 8mm more than the EVGA card, although this is still tiny by today's standards.

The Zotac GTX 650 Ti 2GB also takes advantage of the card's four screen support, by replacing the single mini-HDMI output with two full-size HDMI connections. This gives it an edge over the EVGA card, especially given the use of full-size HDMI connections, which are more popular than mini-HDMI ones.

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As with all of Zotac's amp! Editions, there's a factory overclock applied to the card. The extra 107MHz on the stock core frequency of the GTX 650 Ti 1GB gives it a GPU clock of 1,032MHz, an overclock of 12%. Though this isn't as high an overclock as can be found on the EVGA card, Zotac has also ramped up the memory frequency from 1.35GHz to 1.55GHz, which is a substantial 200MHz (800MHz effective) overclock, and increases the memory bandwidth of the card from 86.4GB/s to 99.2GB/s, a 15% increase.

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Zotac has also opted to include an extra 1GB of available memory for their GTX 650 Ti, giving it 2GB of GDDR5 compared to EVGA's 1GB. The four extra 256MB modules can be found on the back of the card, and are thus left completely uncooled. As with EVGA's version, the other four surround the GPU on the front of the PCB, which also features 3+1 phase power and a top-mounted 6-pin PCI-E power connection.